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Cover for poster magazine Das Plakat special issue on The Movie, October 1920

Leni was born to a Jewish family[3] in Stuttgart. He became an avant-garde painter at the age of 15, he studied at Berlin's Academy of Fine Arts, and subsequently worked as a theatrical set designer, working for a number of theatres in Berlin (but not with Max Reinhardt).

During World War I, Leni started directing as well with films such as Der Feldarzt (Das Tagebuch des Dr. Hart, 1917), Patience (1920), Die Verschwörung zu Genua (1920/21) and Backstairs (1921). Waxworks (1924) was planned as a four-part omnibus feature, but the last part was not shot when money ran out. He also made a series of unusual short animated films Rebus-Film Nr. 1 - 8, which were filmed crossword puzzles.

In 1927, he accepted Carl Laemmle's invitation to become a director at Universal Studios and moved to Hollywood. There Leni made a distinguished directorial debut with The Cat and the Canary (1927), an adaptation of John Willard's stage play. The film had a great influence over Universal's later classic "haunted house" horror series, and was subsequently remade several times, notably in 1939 with Bob Hope. The following year he directed the big budget The Man Who Laughs (based on the novel by Victor Hugo), one of the most visually stylized of late period silent films.

His final film was The Last Warning, envisioned as a companion film for The Cat and the Canary due to its predecessor's popularity.[4] Leni died in Los Angeles on 2 September 1929, of sepsis brought on by an untreated tooth infection, [2] only eight months after its release. [5] He was 44.

^ abLandazuri, Margarita. "The Cat And The Canary". silentfilm.org/. Retrieved November 16, 2016. He died on September 2, 1929, of blood poisoning caused by a neglected tooth infection. He was 44 years old.

^Atkinson, Michael. "The Last Warning". silentfilm.org/. Retrieved November 16, 2016. The kind of party we’re in for was immediately familiar to audiences in 1929 because of the intense popularity two years earlier of Leni’s The Cat and the Canary—to which The Last Warning is devised to be a companion film, almost a redux.

^Atkinson, Michael. "The Last Warning". silentfilm.org/. Retrieved November 16, 2016. was the final film for the illustrious Leni who died eight months after its release of blood poisoning at the age of forty-four.